Mastodon’s weaknesses and how to fix them

That being said, Mastodon still has several major weaknesses. In this blog post, I collect those and explain what’s being done to fix them. It is not meant to be exhaustive: If there is a weakness that affects you and isn’t mentioned here, then please let us know in the comments.

Disclaimer: I tried to be thorough in my research but my knowledge of Mastodon and Bluesky is limited. Thus, I may get things wrong. I appreciate corrections where I do.

Social network vs. social network platform: These two terms are closely related. The social network platform is the software and the social network is the people and programs using that software. You could also argue that a social network includes its platform. In this blog post, both terms are often used interchangeably.

Federated vs. centralized: Defining this difference for social networks is tricky because there are always some centralized aspects. For myself, I ask one question of a social network: What happens if the server/service I’m using disappears? If that means that I lose my followers and followees then the network is centralized. Note that Mastodon still has weaknesses in this regard. We’ll cover those later.

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